21st Century -- The Battle of the Memes

It seems the 21st century will oversee a climactic decisive battle of memeplexes. We are entering the era of violent clashing between fundamental ideologies both new and old. The ones with the most succesful highly viral memeplexes will win.

Take a look at this clip there: http://richarddawkins.net/article,3121,n,n

(this reminds me strongly of the terrifying documentary Jesus Camp)

Look at those people involved. Look at their convulsions, both physical and verbal. Are these people sane? Are they normal?

I maintain that those fanatics are, in fact, perfectly normal people. However, they are also batshit insane. The point to stress is the fanaticism and madness do not arise due to some fault or blemish in those particular people -- the insanity invades perfectly normal minds, much like a cold invades normal bodies. For whatever reason, the viral ideas of their particular church happened to invade their minds at a vulnerable time. These viral memeplexes are now gradually gnawing away at the victim's brain, modifying them to suit the needs of the memeplex itself -- much like the Cordyceps fungus chemically alters the victimised ant's brain to force it to go high up and cling to a twig, while the fungus kills it and sporulates from up high. The Cordyceps is truly a terrifying parasite for the ant it preys on.

And that is the terrifying part. Genetic illnesses, although sad and grotesque, do not terrify the rest of us lucky enough not to have them -- for they cannot spread upon contact. Viral epidemics, however, are terrifying -- even mild sicknesses like colds. Furthermore, when an ant is infected by the Cordyceps, other workers of her colony carry her as far away from the nest as possible, and even remain there to die themselves to spare the colony from infection. Some of our parasitic memeplexes have an even better strategy, however. They modify the environment around the affected to disable any potential ostracism of the victim. The parasite portrays itself to the outside as benign, thereby escaping much of the scrutiny that would otherwise bring forth its end. And there are more potentially vulnerable individuals to come in contact with.

This brings us to a rather interesting way to model and analyse many of the world's events: Human minds are highly malleable, regardless of how much we try to resist. We are much like the molecules a DNA molecule uses to perpetrate itself to the future generations -- they may be thermodynamically resistant to such enslaving, but the genes that have mastered the technique are highly succesful in continuing it further (the other genes just die.) The memes use us to live out their own evolutionary stories, and manage to enslave humans to behave at their whim. Nationalism, political ideology, religion - look how many human lives were lost to the fierce battles between them! Humans are trashed around like socks in a washing machine: innocent, vulnerable people simply trying to live can be converted into vicious irrational killing machines ready to destroy the others who are exactly like them -- albeit parasitised by a different ideology.

This view places no blame on the common folk who are parasitised, regardless of how vile their crime. They were weak, perhaps mentally unhealthy for whatever reason. They became sick. Now their sickness imposes its raging symptoms upon the lives of others.

There are the smart crooks who take advantage of these ideologies, and despite not being aware of the formalisms of memetics, are masters of the field. To the disadvantage of the rest of us, of course. Some of these people are politicians, people of great power. Many of those politicians are parasitised by vile memeplexes as well. Now that is truly scary, for the ideology can express itself to its fullest foul capacity.

The destructive ideologies are evolving along with the beneficial ones. They're getting better and better at what they do. And perhaps this century may be an age where their battle rages greater than ever before.


I'm afraid the only way to combat this would be to launch a memeplex as a counter-offensive. Some benign ideology that self-destructs after a certain timeframe, immunising its victims from future viruses that may not be so benign. Basically, memetic vaccination. The child's mind is particularly malleable, and must be protected from diseases by a proper education.

We face today a slippery slope downwards from anything that can be even marginally considered 'proper education'. Perhaps we are at the lowest level of education and social intelligence in many centuries. Perhaps we have never been as dumb, naive and gullible as we are now, especially in the west. This compounded by the fact that never before have the ideological diseases been so good at what they do, is a very scary detail. I am genuinely worried. And terrified.


We should be careful not to attack the inflicted, but rather attempt to cure them of the infliction. Of course, many of them view us as inflicted (in the religious sense; we definitely all are inflicted by one thing or another in other ways), and that is one advantageous adaptation of their parasite. Imagine a viral disease that made you feel great and also feel the need to spread it to everyone else! If such a virus ever evolved, even if it killed off the host in drastic manners, it would thrive!

Well, that virus is here. It's been here for millenia, and is now more advanced than ever before.

We are on the losing side. Let's get our acts together and spread the antidote of skeptical rationalism as well as awe and adoration of that which truly is, as opposed to that we wish would be. If we wait much longer, it might be too late...

A post of filth

Have to run to class soon, but feel as if I should drop in my two cents on the politics of the Land to the South (i.e. US), since everyone is yapping about it.

I'm definitely not a fan of politics, and will not dedicate excessive keystrokes to the subject. It's all a sticky tangle of lies, self-interest masked by a false concern for the electorate, more lies, even more lies, and (with appologies to slime moulds), filthy slime. Republicans are abysmal, but the Democrats aren't far behind. Obama is what we call in Russian "проходимец" -- someone who slithers his way around any situation, usually in a dirty cheating kind of way. I won't even think about the alternative -- not a healthy way to start one's morning.

So in a way I could just say I don't care, and move on with life. Like your average exemplary citizen of a democratic society. But on the other hand... I'm innately selfish (and so are you), so there's certain issues that mean a lot to me, even to the point where I'm compelled to follow at least a little bit of the foul political sewage. One of those issues, for me, is science.

Back around the 60's, US used to be an amazing place for science and engineering. There was good science education in the compulsory school system, good universities, plenty of funding, and most imporantly, a pretty decent rapport between science and the public. People respected what science brought, and had great interest in it. Same thing on the other side of the sea in the USSR: good education, good science fuding, good public interest. Scientific advancement thrived. Religiosity was kept aside in the quiet, letting people do their jobs safe from bullshit ideologies, for the most part.

Then something happened. The public stopped caring much about science. Scientists became viewed as something of pure evil. Science education plummeted. Religion triumphed. Education eroded away further yet. We get creationists. Research funding is on a steady decline. Despite the ever-growing gap of knowledge we see before us (each scientific advancement reveals more and more of how much remains unknown), work in the field is made more and more difficult.

People feel some obscure right to impale others with their oft ill-founded moral convictions. "I believe abortion/gay marriage/stem cell research/atheism/cracker desecration is bad, therefore no one should be allowed to do it." They start demanding the government to achieve their goal of submitting everyone around the, to their own personal beliefs. They start infiltrating the government. Then we get Louisiana, with an approved stealthy creationist bill to pressure science. There's many of them. They have power. REAL power. They have money.

They have infectious memeplexes on their side.

At least the Democrats are a little itty tiny bit potentially more liberal than the Republicans, and the general agreement in the scientific community is that Obama might cut NSF funding a little bit less than his competitor. If the Republicans return to helm yet again, more money will be dumped into the pointless stupid war in Iraq in the midst of a recession at home, and science will be assaulted both in schools, and in the budget. As soon-to-be grad student, post-doc, etc within the next 15 years, with the possibility of starting my own lab eventually, some day... I'm worried. As a human who sees the dangers of dogmatic faith devoid of any self-correcting mechanism, I'm frightened.

Fundamentalism is not funny. Any sort of it -- be it nationalism, political dogma, religion, some school of philosophy -- is dangerous and degrading to the collective human intellect. Yes they say amusing things, but I can't read them without feeling a mixture of fear and sadness. We find them funny -- they believe they're right. And they have power.


I've heard somewhere that the 21st century will be an era of fundamentalist conflict, both in the Christian and Muslim worlds, and also in terms of nationalism. With the vastly overgrown human population that exceeds the carrying capacity (at least that of psychological sanity), the world is growing more and more competitive and desparate. When people are desparate and threatened, they form tightly-knit groups of similar kin. Religions pray on that -- that's how the memeplexes thrive. Some clever people surface and use these factions to their own advantage, abusing the frightened people convived in their superiority. You get violence, be it ethnic or sectarian tension...or something bigger.

If those people were not united by a conviction of superiority, they would probably be substantially less receptive to arms. If the people were less threatened and desparate, they would be unwilling to fight. One doesn't need much to feel unwilling to fight -- a home, a family, some food...and general political stability. Wealth is irrelevant. We have too many destitute wanderers furious at their past. That is a volatile environment -- not to be ignored. But solving this problem requires long-term thinking -- something capitalism, at least in its Western execution, fails at. One only cares about a couple financial quarters ahead, few bother with looking beyond that.

I think a new political party is in order down south. The Rationalists. Definitely would be a hit... (not). Ah well. Time to work on counter-memeplexes to the creotard filth...